[g9yuayon]

> My whole life, my whole personality is architected around making things by hand for other people.

Not sure if there's a conflict here. We still use compilers, right? Unless we write in machine instructions, there's always some kind of program generations somewhere.

> I get no joy out of duct taping a few libraries together (though I respect others who do).

You still can work on stuff that requires human ingenuity . If you look at the the credits section of the GPT-4 paper, you will see many people there because they are the master of "low-level" optimization. For instance, the author of Reformer is a lead in the Long Context section, because apparently he knows how to reduce the O(N^2) of self attention to O(Nlog(N)), to say the least.